Tolerance always has limits - it cannot tolerate what is itself actively intolerant.
Interpretation
Tolerance cannot accept actions or beliefs that are intolerant.
This quote emphasizes the importance of recognizing boundaries when it comes to tolerance. While it is essential to accept diverse perspectives, there are limits to this acceptance when faced with beliefs or actions that seek to undermine or destroy the very values of tolerance and coexistence. It calls for a balance between openness to differing views and safeguarding against harmful ideologies that promote intolerance.
In practice
During a debate on campus, this quote could be used to highlight the need for a respectful discourse while addressing hate speech.
A liberal education will impart an awareness of the amazing and precious complexity of human relationships. Since those relationships are violated more often out of insensitiveness than out of deliberate intent, whatever increases sensitiveness of perception and understanding humanizes life.
Everyone recognizes a distinction between knowledge and wisdom. . . Wisdom is a kind of knowledge. It is knowledge of the nature, career, and consequences of human values. Since these cannot be separated from the human organism and the social scene, the moral ways of man cannot be understood without knowledge of the ways of things and institutions.
In contrast to totalitarianism, democracy can face and live with the truth about itself.
Idealism, alas, does not protect one from ignorance, dogmatism, and foolishness.
The easiest rationalization for the refusal to seek the truth is the denial that truth exists.
The mob that hails the man on horseback, the Caesars and conquering heroes, does not retain its freedoms for long.
Here's the reality. The image of a white Jesus has been used to justify enslavement, conquest, colonialism, the genocide of indigenous peoples. There are literally millions of human beings whose lives have been snuffed out by people who conquered under the banner of a white god.
There's no limit to how complicated things can get, on account of one thing always leading to another.
Let you look sometimes for the goodness in me, and judge me not.
What is the use of living, if it be not to strive for noble causes.
It is only in solitude that I ever find my own core.
Take a pitcher full of water and set it down in the water-now it has water inside and water outside. We mustn't give it a name, lest silly people start talking again about the body and the soul.
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